The results are in, and “Macaulay Culkin” is the winner. That’s what people voting on what Macaulay Culkin should change his middle name to overwhelmingly decided in a poll on the actor’s website.

So now the Home Alone star’s full name will be Macaulay Macaulay Culkin Culkin, per USA Today. He announced the results in a Christmas Day tweet, in which he said he would legally change his middle name from its current “Carson” in 2019. Culkin announced the poll to change his middle name in November, and voting was open until Christmas Eve.

Options included the victorious “Macaulay Culkin” (60,990 votes); “TheMcRibIsBack” (14,558 votes); Kieran (13,559 votes); “Publicity Stunt” (9,644 votes); and Shark Week (7,515 votes).

(Culkin reprised his Home Alone role this year.)

via: http://www.newser.com/story/269117/macaulay-culkin-heres-my-new-middle-name.html

by Mihir Zaveri

A black man was staying in a Doubletree hotel in Portland, Ore., when he called his mother from the lobby, only to be told by a white security guard that he was trespassing and be escorted out of the building by the police.

The Dec. 22 encounter was captured on cellphone video by the man, Jermaine Massey, who posted it that night on Instagram, where it was shared widely. In other videos, Mr. Massey, 34, acknowledges that he has become part of the continuing documentation, through cellphone videos and social media, of black people being confronted by white authority figures or bystanders while going about their everyday lives.

“I’m afraid to just do normal things now,” Mr. Massey said in an interview Friday, calling the encounter racial profiling. “I’m cautious about what I’m doing, and how people are perceiving that, and I shouldn’t have to think twice about where I take a phone call, or what part of the hotel I can visit.”

Paul Peralta, the general manager of the Portland Doubletree, said in a statement on Friday that “we sincerely apologize to Mr. Massey for his treatment this past weekend, and deeply regret the experience he endured,” adding, “It was unacceptable and contrary to our values, beliefs and how we seek to treat all people who visit our hotel.”

Mr. Peralta said the hotel would ask a third party to “conduct a full investigation into the incident — reviewing our internal processes, protocols and trainings to ensure we are creating and maintaining a safe space for everyone.”

The hotel employees involved in the encounter have been placed on leave during the investigation, Mr. Peralta said. He did not answer further questions about who specifically would be put on leave.

Doubletree is part of Hilton Worldwide. The Portland Doubletree is independently owned and operated, a Hilton spokeswoman said. She said Hilton had “zero tolerance” for racism and was working with the Portland hotel’s management.

The incident was one of numerous widely publicized confrontations this year in which people have called the police on black people for innocuous activities. In October, the police were called on a black man who was babysitting two white children. A white apartment complex manager in Memphis was fired after she called the police on a black man wearing socks in the pool on the Fourth of July.

On the afternoon of Dec. 22, Mr. Massey checked into the Doubletree hotel, then went out to dinner and to a Travis Scott concert before returning around 11 p.m., he says in the videos.

He saw that he had missed a call from his mother and called her back from his cellphone in a secluded spot in the lobby. After a few minutes of discussing what he described as a private “family matter” with her, a security guard, who is white and has not been publicly identified beyond his name plate, which read “Earl,” walked up to Mr. Massey and asked what room he was in, Mr. Massey said.

“I said: ‘I don’t know, I’m having a conversation right now. Can you leave me alone right now?’” Mr. Massey recalls in the Instagram videos.

The guard then said that Mr. Massey was trespassing and that he was going to call the police, according to Mr. Massey.

At this point, the videos that Mr. Massey recorded of the encounter begin, showing the security guard standing over him and telling him that the police will arrive soon to escort him off the property. Mr. Massey points out that he is a guest at the hotel.

“Not anymore,” the security guard responds.

Another hotel employee — whose position is not clear in the video — walks over, and says the guard “wouldn’t ask me to call 911 without any cause.”

The second employee tells Mr. Massey to calm down and asks him what the problem is.

Mr. Massey then shows the guard and the other employee the envelope containing his room key.

The videos of the encounter end with a Portland Police Bureau officer telling Mr. Massey that the security guard is “in control of the property.”

Mr. Massey says in his later videos that he left the hotel after collecting his things from his room so as “not to make a bad situation worse.” The encounter with the police was not hostile, said Greg Kafoury, a lawyer for Mr. Massey.

Sgt. Chris Burley, a spokesman for the Portland Police Bureau, said in a statement on Friday that the hotel had the authority to ask Mr. Massey to leave, and that the police officer had offered to help him get to a new hotel, which Mr. Massey declined.

Mr. Massey drove himself to a nearby Sheraton.

Mr. Kafoury said that Mr. Massey was not satisfied with the hotel’s response so far, and that it had not publicly specified why he was targeted.

“We’re getting corporate-speak instead of straightforward answers,” he said.

via: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/28/us/black-man-kicked-out-hotel-portland.html

The mugshot of a 19-year-old man sparked a social media frenzy as many appeared to be astonished by the man’s age.

Murad Mansurovich Kurbanov was arrested Tuesday and charged with theft of a rental vehicle, failure to stop at the command of police and reckless driving, according to FOX 13 Salt Lake City.

His alleged crime, however, isn’t what got social media riled up.

A mugshot was posted on the FOX 13 Salt Lake City Facebook page and comments poking fun at the man ensued.

“Where’s the 19 yr old?? I only see the 40 yr old,” one person commented.

“If that dude is 19 then I’m 12,” another person wrote.

Another wrote: “This dude really makes me feel good about being in my 40’s”.

As of Thursday morning, the post had generated more than 650 comments.

One user also admitted they were only there for the comments.MOn Tuesday, police saw a U-Haul van run through multiple red lights and illegally pass vehicles in Murray. Police attempted to pull Kurbanov over but he didn’t stop, FOX 13 Salt Lake City reported, citing a probable cause statement.

Later, a tip led police to Kurbanov’s location. He was found at a Murray apartment complex and told responding officers he was there visiting a friend, the station reported, citing a probable cause statement.

Police escorted him to his friend’s apartment but no one answered and he couldn’t provide another way of contacting the friend, the station reported.

The U-Haul rental he had rented was supposed to be returned Dec. 14, but wasn’t. Under Utah state law, it was considered to be stolen.

via: https://start.att.net/news/read/article/fox_news-teens_mugshot_goes_viral_for_the_wrong_reason-rfoxnews/category/news

LONDON, Ky. (AP) — Authorities say a Kentucky man has been arrested after he threw a ham at a woman during an argument over which day Christmas dinner should take place.

WAVE-TV reports that David Brannon was arrested Sunday after he tried to flee from police officers who reported to a home on a domestic dispute call.

The Laurel County Sheriff’s Office said Brannon threw items at the woman, including the ham to be eaten for Christmas dinner.

Deputies say several items were found on the kitchen floor.

Brannon is being held in the Laurel County Correctional Center on charges of assault and fleeing or evading police. Online jail records do not show if he has a lawyer.

via: https://www.kmov.com/news/kentucky-man-charged-with-throwing-christmas-ham-at-woman/article_95491423-8730-5dc4-a435-e97f600f0317.html

When 7-year-old Bailey Sheehan arrived at a hospital in Oregon partially paralyzed, a doctor said the girl was faking her symptoms to get her parents’ attention because she was jealous of her new baby sister.

But that doctor was proved wrong when an MRI showed that the girl had acute flaccid myelitis or AFM, a polio-like disease that’s struck hundreds of children since 2014.

Erin Olivera, mother of a child with AFM and founder of a private Facebook page for parents of 400 children with the disease, says Bailey’s experience is hardly unique. She estimates that based on postings by parents, as many as 1 in 10 children were told that the paralysis was all in their heads when they first sought medical care.

Experts who study the art and science of diagnosis say the problem goes beyond this one rare disease. They say that in general, when presented with a puzzling disease, physicians too often leap to a diagnosis of a psychiatric problem.

“Mental disorders become the default position to deal with medical uncertainty,” said Dr. Allen Frances, former chair of psychiatry at the Duke University School of Medicine. “It’s widespread, and it’s dangerous.”

Dr. Mark Graber, president emeritus of the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine, added, “It’s a tendency that physicians have when they can’t find a physical cause.

“It’s bad. It’s very bad.”

Bailey’s story

Bailey was a healthy little girl until October 28, 2014, when she suddenly couldn’t move her neck or her right shoulder or leg.

A rehabilitation expert at a children’s hospital said Bailey wasn’t really paralyzed, according to her mother, Mikell Sheehan.

The doctor said the paralysis was an emotional reaction to her sister’s birth four months earlier. He diagnosed Bailey with a mental condition called conversion disorder.

Sheehan told the doctor off.

“I said, ‘You’ve been with my child for 15 minutes, and you think it’s psychological? Get out of my face,’ ” she remembered.

Sheehan said the doctor hinted that she was unstable.

“He said, you know, ‘moms with new babies don’t get enough sleep,’ ” she said.

Bailey’s regular pediatrician, who’d known the girl since birth, disagreed with the diagnosis and pushed for further testing. That’s when the MRI showed that she had AFM.

Armed with the correct diagnosis, Bailey received treatment for AFM, including extensive physical therapy, and four years later is walking again.

“We were lucky that her pediatrician was such an advocate for us, but I don’t know if everyone’s that lucky,” Sheehan said.

Sheehan says she understands why doctors didn’t immediately think of AFM for her daughter, because the disease was not well-known four years ago. But there are several other causes of paralysis in children, and she wonders why her daughter didn’t get a full round of testing for those.

Dr. Benjamin Greenberg, a neurologist who’s seen cases of AFM across the country, said that even this year, when AFM has made headlines nationally, parents have told him that doctors have missed the disease and suggested that their children were faking their paralysis.

“The stories I can tell are maddening and saddening,” said Greenberg, associate professor of neurology at UT Southwestern Medical Center.

Four years later, Sheehan says, she still feels the scars from her daughter’s misdiagnosis.

“You feel violated and wrongly accused,” she said.

The dangers of false certainty

Though there’s no data indicating how frequently doctors misdiagnose physical conditions as psychiatric ones, experts in the field of diagnosis say they see it all too often.

It typically starts when a patient has a perplexing illness and doctors feel a need to come up with a diagnosis.

“Doctors are uncomfortable with not having answers,” Frances said.

The consequences can be “catastrophic,” he said, because a misdiagnosis can lead to a patient receiving treatment for a disease they don’t have and missing out on treatment for the disease they do have.

“False certainty is much more dangerous than uncertainty,” he said.

The American Medical Association and the American College of Emergency Physicians declined requests for comment.

Graber, who is also professor emeritus of medicine at the Stony Brook University in New York, said part of the problem is that medical students are taught that physical symptoms sometimes have a psychological basis. That’s true, he said, but doctors need to thoroughly test for physical problems before defaulting to a psychiatric diagnosis.

“Physicians have an obligation to do a thorough workup before turning to a psychological explanation,” he said. “When a doctor can’t find a cause, that’s a great time to get a second opinion or consult with a specialist.”

Frances added that it’s OK for a doctor to simply say “I don’t know.”

“Doctors need to learn to embrace medical uncertainty,” he said.

via: https://pix11.com/2018/12/22/a-growing-trend-doctor-tells-parents-their-partially-paralyzed-7-year-old-was-faking-her-symptoms/